The dynamic nature of student discipline and discipline disparities.

Researchers have long used end-of-year discipline rates to identify punitive schools, explore sources of inequitable treatment, and evaluate interventions designed to stem both discipline and racial disparities in discipline. Yet, this approach leaves us with a "static view"-with no sense of how disciplinary responses fluctuate throughout the year. What if daily discipline rates, and daily discipline disparities, shift over the school year in ways that could inform when and where to intervene? This research takes a "dynamic view" of discipline. It leverages 4 years of atypically detailed data regarding the daily disciplinary experiences of 46,964 students from 61 middle schools in one of the nation's largest school districts. Reviewing these data, we find that discipline rates are indeed dynamic. For all student groups, the daily discipline rate grows from the beginning of the school year to the weeks leading up to the Thanksgiving break, falls before major breaks, and grows following major breaks. During periods of escalation, the daily discipline rate for Black students grows significantly faster than the rate for White students-widening racial disparities. Given this, districts hoping to stem discipline and disparities may benefit from timing interventions to precede these disciplinary spikes. In addition, early-year Black-White disparities can be used to identify the schools in which Black-White disparities are most likely to emerge by the end of the school year. Thus, the results reported here provide insights regarding not only when to intervene, but where to intervene to reduce discipline rates and disparities.

Provider implicit and explicit bias in person-centered maternity care: a cross-sectional study with maternity providers in Northern Ghana.

BACKGROUND: Person-centered maternity care (PCMC) has become a priority in the global health discourse on quality of care due to the high prevalence of disrespectful and lack of responsive care during facility-based childbirth. Although PCMC is generally sub-optimal, there are significant disparities. On average, women of low socioeconomic status (SES) tend to receive poorer PCMC than women of higher SES. Yet few studies have explored factors underlying these inequities. In this study, we examined provider implicit and explicit biases that could lead to inequitable PCMC based on SES. METHODS: Data are from a cross-sectional survey with 150 providers recruited from 19 health facilities in the Upper East region of Ghana from October 2020 to January 2021. Explicit SES bias was assessed using situationally-specific vignettes (low SES and high SES characteristics) on providers' perceptions of women's expectations, attitudes, and behaviors. Implicit SES bias was assessed using an Implicit Association Test (IAT) that measures associations between women's SES characteristics and providers' perceptions of women as 'difficult' or 'good'. Analysis included descriptive statistics, mixed-model ANOVA, and bivariate and multivariate linear regression. RESULTS: The average explicit bias score was 18.1 out of 28 (SD = 3.60) for the low SES woman vignette and 16.9 out of 28 (SD = 3.15) for the high SES woman vignette (p < 0.001), suggesting stronger negative explicit bias towards the lower SES woman. These biases manifested in higher agreement to statements such as the low SES woman in the vignette is not likely to expect providers to introduce themselves and is not likely to understand explanations. The average IAT score was 0.71 (SD = 0.43), indicating a significant bias in associating positive characteristics with high SES women and negative characteristics with low SES women. Providers with higher education had significantly lower explicit bias scores on the low SES vignette than those with less education. Providers in private facilities had higher IAT scores than those in government hospitals. CONCLUSIONS: The findings provide evidence of both implicit and explicit SES bias among maternity providers. These biases need to be addressed in interventions to achieve equity in PCMC and to improve PCMC for all women.

A scalable empathic-mindset intervention reduces group disparities in school suspensions.

Suspensions remove students from the learning environment at high rates throughout the United States. Policy and theory highlight social groups that face disproportionately high suspension rates-racial-minoritized students, students with a prior suspension, and students with disabilities. We used an active placebo-controlled, longitudinal field experiment (Nteachers = 66, Nstudents = 5822) to test a scalable "empathic-mindset" intervention, a 45- to 70-min online exercise to refocus middle school teachers on understanding and valuing the perspectives of students and on sustaining positive relationships even when students misbehave. In preregistered analyses, this exercise reduced suspension rates especially for Black and Hispanic students, cutting the racial disparity over the school year from 10.6 to 5.9 percentage points, a 45% reduction. Significant reductions were also observed for other groups of concern. Moreover, reductions persisted through the next year when students interacted with different teachers, suggesting that empathic treatment with even one teacher in a critical period can improve students' trajectories through school.

A scalable empathic supervision intervention to mitigate recidivism from probation and parole.

Incarceration is a pervasive issue in the United States that is enormously costly to families, communities, and society at large. The path from prison back to prison may depend on the relationship a person has with their probation or parole officer (PPO). If the relationship lacks appropriate care and trust, violations and recidivism (return to jail or prison) may be more likely to occur. Here, we test whether an "empathic supervision" intervention with PPOs-that aims to reduce collective blame against and promote empathy for the perspectives of adults on probation or parole (APPs)-can reduce rates of violations and recidivism. The intervention highlights the unreasonable expectation that all APPs will reoffend (collective blame) and the benefits of empathy-valuing APPs' perspectives. Using both within-subject (monthly official records for 10 mo) and between-subject (treatment versus control) comparisons in a longitudinal study with PPOs in a large US city (NPPOs = 216; NAPPs =∼20,478), we find that the empathic supervision intervention reduced collective blame against APPs 10 mo postintervention and reduced between-subject violations and recidivism, a 13% reduction that would translate to less taxpayer costs if scaled. Together, these findings illustrate that very low-cost psychological interventions that target empathy in relationships can be cost effective and combat important societal outcomes in a lasting manner.

A Vicious Cycle: A Social-Psychological Account of Extreme Racial Disparities in School Discipline.

Can social-psychological theory provide insight into the extreme racial disparities in school disciplinary action in the United States? Disciplinary problems carry enormous consequences for the quality of students' experience in school, opportunities to learn, and ultimate life outcomes. This burden falls disproportionately on students of color. Integrating research on stereotyping and on stigma, we theorized that bias and apprehension about bias can build on one another in school settings in a vicious cycle that undermines teacher-student relationships over time and exacerbates inequality. This approach is more comprehensive than accounts in which the predicaments of either teachers or students are considered alone rather than in tandem, it complements nonpsychological approaches, and it gives rise to novel implications for policy and intervention. It also extends prior research on bias and stigmatization to provide a model for understanding the social-psychological bases of inequality more generally.